(I feel like we need a sticky thread of misc movie news, little things about movies that aren't important enough (to us) to warrant a whole thread).

Okay, I just saw a photo from A Million Ways To Die In The West... d*mn.  Oh d*mn I wish I hadn't seen that.  I had BETTER forget that by the time the blu-ray comes around (cause I ain't seeing it in the theater) because... oh, that would have blown my mind if it hadn't been ruined.  Oh god.

I finally got around to seeing [i[X-Men: Days Of Future Past[/i]... I wanted to see it on the biggest screen before it got displaced (which meant 3D b/c I'm not paying full price for a small screen, screw that sh*t).  But oh man, I dug it.  i haven't seen the 3rd X-Men since it came out (and I've tried my best to forget it because it was garbage), I didn't see the Wolverine flicks (my dad gave me the last one on Blu-Ray, but the rated version and I never swapped it out, it's still in the plastic), and I don't really remember First Class (and my hearing aid didn't work, so I didn't REALLY see it when I saw it) so... it feels like an eternity since I was in the X-Men world.  X-2 was the last solid point for me, really.  So almost ten years later, seeing them all come back, ugh that was great.  And now the effects, if you've seen the Sentinel bunker attack clip online, THAT'S the X-Men I remember from a kid, now the movies can REALLY show them.  You take that, you bring in the original movie X-Men and then the best bits of First Class, it's almost like a singularity film, which I think is really great.  It feels like that core is back.  Not the core cast, maybe the core ideals, but that center, that indefinable thing that makes the X-Men movies the X-Men movies.

Something I'd have to rewatch and check, but I thought was cool, was that the future stuff matched the original movie style, and the past sort of matches the Matthew Vaughn style.  And I feel like... they did SOMETHING to the Lower Level set when they rebuilt it, they might hvae made it a lighter colour, because it looks like the one in the original but it also does feel like something that would be "futuristic" in the 70s as well.

I'm darn certain I'll be buying the Blu-Ray... right after I get some other blu-rays I want.  The Wolverine thing, though... I only want to see the Unrated version, which naturally isn't the one I have.  Darn darn darn.

Well, they made that Phase One briefcase dealie when the Avengers Blu-Ray came out.  But obviously that doesn't work cross-styudios (it's why Firefly and Serenity will never be packaged together officially.

Chef 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLuixZwiIdU

I can admittedly say, if I was watching Chef on DVD, I would have turned it off within the first 45 minutes. But since I was a captured audience in the movie theater, I sat through the whole thing.

The final result was very satisfying. Chef is a feel good story with no great consequence. Jon Favreau is writer/director/star in an homage to chef’s and cooking and self discovery.

I didn’t like the first half because a lot of it had to do with twitter and Facebook and social networks. I really didn’t understand some of the implications. The first half hour also looks exactly like a cooking show. Way to many long detailed shots of making food.  I also didn’t buy into he was once married to Sofia Vergara, and that lost some believability in the simple story of honorable chef figuring out what makes him happy.

Loved the cast with Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Platt, John Leguizamo (always love John), Scarlett Johansen and Emjay Anthony is a great find as the Jon’s son.

In the end, I walked away happy. I think most people will like Chef.

Well, the book is Japanese, so yeah, I'll bet that the denouement was just added in.  They're not afraid to end their stories with everyone being dead.

I'm not talking a dark ending, I'm talking "the characters die and that's IT."  All our movies, even the dark ones, have this beat called the denouement, the happily ever after moment... without it, the endings seem abrupt and confusing.  So they needed to add one to Edge Of Tomorrow but they didn't have anyone left to cut to.

Think of Sunshine, everyone on the spaceship died, but then we see Earth and know there's hope, and we see the Sydney Opera House deep in snow, and it was a dangling thread they'd established earlier: EOT didn't really have that so they had to play around to put that emotional beat in there.

Not sure where to post this since it covers a couple areas, but since I saw it in a movie theater, I'll post it here.

Monty Python Live (Mostly)

And it was: broadcast from the O2 live to theaters around the world and Gold Television in the UK, the final night of Monty Python's (probably) final show.  Amazingly, for 1.30pm on a Sunday, the theater was PACKED with people.  I swear, I thought the place was full, and I still saw swarms of people flow in.

Being live meant there were some issues, the sound kept cutting in and out for the first ten minutes (in every theater around the world!), the image had this watery wavery quality every now and then (like a heat mirage), but at least it was uncensored.  They cursed a LOT, the poor TV viewers had to hear the beeps over and over.  Of ocurse, the TV viewers had programming during the intermission, we poor suckers in theaters around the world had to spend a whole half hour playing with our phones and watching a big countdown clock.

Eric Idle was all over this one because there were so many musical numbers (and there was a whole dance troupe as well), and the sketches... well, we've seen them all before, but they were all fun.  The only one they really changed was Blackmail, and that was pretty fun (a mystery guest!).  And there were quite a few enjoyable technical fouls: forgotten lines, uncontrollable laughing, ad-libbing that stopped the flow dead in its' track (particularly in the dead parrot sketch), and Eric Idle trying to keep his fake moustache on without touching it.  Priceless.

It'll be on DVD and blu-ray, I'm sure, so I won't spoil [more of] it, but definitely worth checking out.  Though not as original and fresh as "Not The Messiah."